"When they think of anything regarding Latino films, people automatically think of Mexico, or any other country, but you never think about Brazilian or Brazilian immigrants, or Brazilians in the U.S."
Classic France is a country of nuance with a love of conversation and freedom and an aversion to fanaticism. Contemporary Houellebecq describes France as a museum, where landscape turns into decor and where rural areas are emptying out.
In 1959, the woman who brought me into this world bundled me in a basket and placed me in a Hong Kong stairwell near Sai Yeung Choi Street, a bustling region of the British colony. I was 4 days old. A passerby called the police, who transported me to St. Christopher's Home, the largest non-government-run orphanage on the island.
A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
What I mean is that 'religion' was the way the classical sociologists like like Emil Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber first managed to turn 'society' into something you could actually study. Durkheim's Elementary Forms defines religion as a system of beliefs and practices tied to sacred things, and what matters there is how those beliefs and rituals bind people together into a moral community-the church. For him, the believer isn't wrong to think he depends on a higher power.
Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.
Gomis told DW the film includes a tribute to his late father. Part of the production was filmed in the village where his father was born, in the Cacheu region of Guinea-Bissau. "The grave you see in the film, the one the two characters speak to and touch that is my father's grave. The photograph of that man in the film that is my father," he said.
The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.
Liadan Ní Chuinn was born in Northern Ireland in 1998, the year the Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles, the decades of violence stemming from England's occupation of Ireland. Other recent fiction about the Troubles-the novels and Trespasses , the TV show Derry Girls (all excellent)-is set firmly in the last century, relegating the violence to history. Ní Chuinn's work does the opposite: Their new book of short stories, Every One Still Her e, is set in contemporary Northern Ireland.
Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.
Yiyun Li reads her story 'Calm Sea and Hard Faring,' from the March 9, 2026, issue of the magazine. Li is the author of eight books of fiction, including the novels 'Must I Go' and 'The Book of Goose,' and the story collection 'Wednesday's Child,' which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024.
She moved before the pandemic, when gentrification with its huge skyscrapers and condominiums forced her out of Dumbo, Brooklyn. Between the kitchen and the upstairs room, in one corner of which lie part of the 5,000 pages of notes she took while writing it, Desai finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the monumental, 19thcenturystyle novel she has spent nearly two decades on.
Research has linked reading for pleasure in childhood to a host of positive educational and socioeconomic outcomes. But now 14 years after the Department for Education, in a more innocent time, commissioned a chunky report on the matter—reading books for pleasure is an activity in crisis. The culprit usually blamed for this falling-off is the smartphone and its many short-term distractions; the mere presence of a smartphone in the room, recent research suggests, has an impact on our ability to concentrate.
